Leak of revenue figures adds to Twitter’s bad day; shares fall 18%

As the San Francisco company’s stock fell more than 17%, the New York Stock Exchange halted trading at 3: 27 p.m. Eastern time, about 20 minutes after the first tweet. By the time trading resumed for the last 13 minutes of the day, a crush of mostly automatic computer-generated sell orders flooded the market.

The company lost $162.4 million, compared with a loss of $132.4 million in the year-earlier quarter. Revenue jumped to $435.9 million from $250.5 million, but still fell far short of analysts’ expectations of $463 million.

“The numbers were clearly weak,” said analyst Brian Wieser at Pivotal Research Group.

Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo said in a conference call with financial analysts that he was “disappointed.”

Twitter said it had signed up with Google’s DoubleClick ad serving platform to measure and track ad performance better and to make Twitter ads available through DoubleClick’s automated ad auction system. Twitter also announced the acquisition of direct response ad company TellApart.